REALITY CHECK: I spent my life recovering from advice my mother gave me

No Irish kid ever
loved his mother more than I did. But through most of my childhood and all my
teen years I pushed her, I'm sure, toward thoughts of suicide. Or possibly
homicide.

Before the
Alzheimer's stole most of her marbles, my mom was a smart, savvy cookie,
especially for a woman who came of age during the myopically misogynistic 1940s
and '50s.

She was a strong,
intelligent woman, which is probably why I'm attracted to strong, intelligent
women to this day. But I don't want to get all Freudian here, or Oedipusilian
(which is a word I just extracted from the epic tragedy by Sophocles; let's see
if we can't get it in the next edition, Mr. Webster).

Despite her
strength and intelligence, my mother was still very much a woman of her time
and as such, she had a rich store of sayings, proverbs, maxims, and curses that
addressed, though sometimes only elliptically, most any situation.

By the time I was a
young adult, I had learned to tune my parents out and replace whatever they
were saying with the lyrics from Alice Cooper's "Welcome to My Nightmare" LP.
But earlier on, when I was just a kid, I, like most kids, thought everything my
mother said was the unadulterated, unfiltered truth.

One of my favorites
was, "If you keep making that face it'll freeze that way!"

Now, I was 8, and
when mom said this, I took her at her word. Since I was a huge fan of horror
movies, horror magazines and all things horror, I practiced for hours in front
of the mirror, trying to get my face to fold into a reasonable facsimile of Lon
Cheney's werewolf, Bela Lugosi's Dracula, or the gill-necked Creature from the
Black Lagoon. I figured if I could get my face to freeze in some monstrous
sneer or snarl, I would be able to keep girls and their cooties away from me
for life!

As it turns out, I
was able to keep girls away even without making gruesome expressions, a talent
I maintain to this very day.

"I hope your kids
turn out just like you!" This one was usually delivered to my receding back as
I stormed from the house following a heated mother-son quarrel. It didn't
bother me at the time because at age 13 the notion of having kids of my own
seemed as remote as the rings around Saturn.

Later in life,
though, my mother's curse echoed across the years and filled me with dread.

As it turned out, I
needn't have worried; my own kids, when they came along, were wonderful and
gave me almost no trouble from birth right through to the day they left the
nest. Years later I learned my daughter was up to all sorts of crazy, dangerous
hijinks during her teen years, but she was smart enough not to let me find out.
So I was able to go through parenthood blissfully unaware of any wrongdoing.

My mom also assured
me that: a) The Beatles were a "fad" and not as good as The Monkeys anyway, b)
it is impossible to have a physical relationship with a nice, Catholic girl
until after a big, church wedding, and c) eating meatloaf will "build
character."

She was wrong on
all counts. And yet, all these years later, I still find myself attracted to
nice Catholic girls with lousy taste in music who know how to make meatloaf.

It's probably best
I don't know what Freud and Sophocles have to say on the subject.